Lacrosse is a high-speed and high energy game requiring significant player speed, agility, and stick skills. Players often spend a considerable amount of time and energy training to improve their speed, agility, and stick skills. In addition, player strength also plays a fundamental role in their performance. As a result, there are known devices for adding weight (such as a simulated ball) to a lacrosse stick as a training or warm-up aid to improve strength, act as a stretching routine, and improve agility. These known devices operate to work the shoulder, arm, and hand muscles that are used by athletes when playing lacrosse.
Known training devices are designed to add weight to the sidewalls of the head or to the base (throat) of the lacrosse stick. Other known training devices involve adding weight to the shaft, the throat, or the sidewalls of the head of the lacrosse stick. Still other known training devices do not directly secure a weight within the pocket and instead use a tether arrangement. With these known training devices, however, the weight of the device is not situated in the true pocket position of the head of the lacrosse stick where a lacrosse ball would actually sit during play. Rather than residing in the pocket, the weight is held at the throat, sidewalls, or shaft of the lacrosse stick.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a training device that holds a weight at the specific point of a lacrosse stick head pocket that corresponds to where a ball would sit during actual play. Such a training device would allow players to exercise the same muscles used as if they were handling a real ball and provide a feel to the stick as if an actual ball were residing in the pocket.